Over the past few months we’ve started hearing about Terra Nova, a TV series for Fox with Steven Spielbergon board as one of the producers. The show has been said to involve time travel, dinosaurs and some other sci-fi elements. Few details have been known, and while we still don’t know a lot, there are a few new tidbits that have come to light just as Fox is on the threshold of announcing a series order.

EW says that Spielberg has recorded a video introduction that will be presented to advertisers on Monday if Fox commits to the show. We’ve been hearing that a 13-episode order was almost guaranteed to happen, and that Fox was going to order that straight off rather than going through the pilot process, due to the large expense involved in the sets and production.

So what is the show really about?

We’ve said before that the Craig Silverstein and Kelly Marcel script is about “a family who live 100 years from now on future Earth, who are flung back in time 150 million years to the prehistoric age, when Earth was ruled by dinosaurs.”

EW now elaborates a bit:

[Terra Nova] begins in 2149 A.D. The scene: a large group of settlers are preparing to leave the apocalyptic world they live in to time travel back millions of years via a massive, high-tech contraption. Their goal is to see trees, enjoy a blue sky, eat real food – basically, to start over in this so-called Eden. But what they find is unlike anything they were expecting.

The big question is casting. We’d known that an offer (supposedly a ‘very lucrative’ one) had gone out to Kyle Chandler from Friday Night Lights, but EW says he passed. We’ll likely hear more about the cast next week; there have to be other names ready to go if Fox is on the cusp of ordering the show. Terra Nova is scheduled to shoot this summer in Hawaii, which should also lead to a few expectations about what it might look like.